Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (31 page)

O
N Monday morning I drove out to the Schenley
ranch to ask the workers about pesticides. Like the rest of
us, farm workers are slowly being poisoned by the pesticide
residues that we take in with our food at every meal; in
addition, they suffer from direct exposure that has often
been fatal. According to the Union, the California Public
Health Department has many documented cases of
pesticide poisoning among farm workers, including mass
blindness and the death of children, but it doesn’t act on
them.

“You can smell the poison sometimes in Delano,” Chavez
says. “It’s very very strong. Workers can’t begin to comprehend
the dangers of these sprays; most of them look
so innocent. I’m determined to do battle against the
growers on this, and I think the best way is to put it in the
contract. The workers have to be educated. These sprays
are creepers. If they knocked you out immediately, it
would be a lot easier to educate the people and to make
our point. But a guy might go out and spray for a week,
and that’s the end of the job with that grower, and then
he may take a job with another grower doing something
else, and maybe several jobs later he begins to have
trouble with his eyes, can’t focus and comes in to see a
doctor. Well, that’s an industrial-accident case, but it’s
hell to prove it, since the damage was done so long before.
The insurance company won’t honor it. I think the whole
industrial insurance thing has to be changed; even the
payments are very discriminatory and unjust to farm
workers.

“The ones that are most innocent are the ones that are
most often hurt, especially if they don’t read English. I’ve
gone out personally and had it out with them. The guy
says, ‘Well, it’s
my
life, ain’t it?’ And I say, ‘No, it’s not
your life, it’s everybody’s life, and we got to start some
place, so we’re starting with you. What do you think would
happen if you died of poisoning? And you had a union?
Who do you think would be blamed? The employer? Hell,
no.
We
’d be blamed, for not protecting you.’”

The road to Schenley passes its wine-processing plant,
a dark, looming industrial building which is less incongruous
than one might imagine in this flat, manipulated
landscape. Arriving at the ranch offices, I asked to see P. L.
Vargas, head of the workers’ ranch committee, and was
rudely informed by the red-haired ranch superintendent,
E. L. Redger, that I would have to see Vargas at his own
house after working hours. Even before he learned my
mission, Redger’s face revealed anger, and I got the impression
that this anger was a part of him, like his thin mouth;
he looked like a man who has waited for George Wallace
all his life. As I left he offered the tight-faced opinion that
Paul Vargas had invited me as an excuse to avoid work.

I had hardly reached the public road when I overtook a
yellow spray buggy, and I shouted to its driver, asking for
P. L. Though the sprayer was shut down, there was so much
white poison powder blowing loose in the machinery that
the driver was wearing gloves and goggles and a snoutlike
mask of the sort worn a few weeks later by Mayor Daley’s
goon squads in Chicago; he yanked his mask down long
enough to cry out, “
Peek
opp,
peek
opp!,” pointing at a
pickup truck down the road. Catching up with the pickup,
I yelled to Mr. Vargas that Redger had forbidden me to
enter the ranch, at which Vargas yelled back, “Follow me!”
and led me straight into the vineyards. We passed down
miles of monotonous green walls, arriving at a point where
some dusting rigs were waiting for more bags of pesticide.
“You ask these guys anything you want!” P. L. Vargas
shouted. “I going to call Dolores!” He drove off in a fury.

One of the spray men told me that Dolores Huerta had
had trouble before with Redger, whose low opinion of his
workers is reciprocated. “I know this guy for nine, ten
year,” one told me, “and he never once say hi—he walk
right by you. Against the Union, against
every
poor people;
he just don’t like Mexicans, I guess.” The man laughed,
perplexed. “Maybe this kind of man, he don’t like nothin.”

There were three Mexican-Americans on the dusting
rigs, and none of them wore gloves; they explained that
the company issued gloves for the wet spraying of parathion
and other chemicals but not for dusting with dry sulphur.
One of the three men was still feeling sick from the last
wet spraying, and all three were anxious to talk about it.

“Before the Union come, we didn’t get no gloves, no
anything, and we got the itch”—he pronounced it
“eetch”—“oh, some guys got it bad! That wet spray in the wind, it
bring them little eggs—how you call them? Blisters?
Blisters. The dry sulphur ain’t so bad until you sweat; then
it get under your skin and the itch begin. You have to use
soap and water right away, and before the Union, they
never give these things. And some the people get sick from
eatin without washin their hands—oh, that stuff is bad!
Got to keep the children away from that! My eyes get red
and they sting, you know, but I ain’t like P. L. I still see
pretty good.”

“That wet spray!” another said. “Every time the wind
blow in the wrong direction we used to get wet, and then
we get a rash, start scratching, everything get worse. Between
my legs, under my arms. My stomach. Our eyes used
to burn.”

“We still don’t have no spray suits, but they say they
goin to buy some. Maybe next year. We got masks and
gloves. A lot of ranches, they don’t even got no gloves yet.”

“Sometimes at night, the wind change and you don’t
notice it; you dust the wrong direction and you got trouble.
We try to tell the new people to watch the wind and
everything, tell them to wear a mask, but they don’t know
anything. One guy never listen, and he sniff that stuff,
and in five second”—he snapped his fingers—“the blood
start coming up. He didn’t die but he was very very sick
for three weeks there. And some of the sick ones, they
won’t go to the doctor—they just don’t believe in doctors.”

A man in a sombrero with a small bell dangling from the
rim grunted disgustedly. “Them ones that come up from
Mexico,” he said. “They so damn ignorant, you know.”
In the same context, Chavez had said “innocent.” I asked
the men what they thought of Chavez. “Cesar?” They
looked at the man in the belled sombrero, who spoke up
for the others. “Cesar’s a pretty good man,” he assured me
solemnly. “A pretty good man.”

The three chattered resentfully about Rubio and
Mendoza.

“He t’rowin around a lot of money—where he get that?”

A foreman, Danny Sanchez, came along on his tractor,
dragging more sacks of sulphur powder on a wagon. While
the drivers loaded up their hoppers he paused to listen,
nodding his head. “This guy Joe Mendoza, and Gilbert
Rubio,” he said, “they got a bunch of people wit them,
but that is a labor contractor’s organization. Before the
Union, I work pretty close to the big trucks on the ranch,
you know, and I hear what they tell on the radios, and
one day I hear one of the labor contractors askin for a
raise, he wanted eleven dollars a ton. So I get back to
work, and I ask the pickers how much they gettin paid for
a tank of grapes, and they say, ‘Eleven dollars.’ ‘Eleven
dollars?’ ‘Yah, they payin eleven dollars.’ Well, in a tank
they two and a half tons, so the contractors, they receivin
all the money for the peoples, and they takin more than
half of it for themselves!” Sanchez laughed. “That’s why
the crew pusher don’t want no Union, he wants to keep
everyting the way it is, so he goin along wit Rubio and
Mendoza!”

A man finished loading and drove off down the lane.
Before entering the rows, he got off his tractor and started
up the blower that discharged sulphur from the hopper,
then darted back like a shadow through the white cloud to
throw the tractor into gear and escape the poison that he
had let loose.

P. L. Vargas returned with permission for me to be where
I already was. “Anybody want to come to see P. L.,” he
muttered, angry still, “they come to see me.”

I talked with him and Sanchez for a little while. Both
men were unabashed admirers of Cesar Chavez, and irrevocably
pro-Union; in talking to me about it, they
interrupted each other out of pure enthusiasm. They agreed
that if a secret ballot could be taken, 95 percent of the
workers on most ranches would be pro-Union, but that the
workers were uneducated people who did not speak English
very well, and were afraid. “They scared if they do
anything, the boss just kick them out,” P. L. Vargas said.
“And if you got kids, you got to work, you know. If you
got kids, you got to work every day.” Vargas is a very big
man, with heavy eyebrows and small steel glasses; at the
very mention of children he looked worried. “Yah!” Danny
said. “We know we livin in a free country, but the growers
don’t know it yet! When the picket line came to Di Giorgio,
they had
everyting
out there to drown them out.” At the
memory, Danny giggled with delight. “Man, they had
radios, they had loudspeakers, car horns, bells! Why they
don’t want a secret ballot? Because they afraid!”

Now they were not only paid a decent wage but the wage
was guaranteed. Dispoto, P. L. said, was paying $1.60 per
hour at the moment because he needed people for the
harvest, but later he could drop the wage to $1.40, and
anybody who didn’t like it was out of a job. He and Danny
had a two-year contract for $1.90 an hour; it would automatically
be raised 10 cents next year. Not only that, but the
work hours were regulated now, with time and a half for
overtime. “Before we used to work like a mule,” P. L. said.
“Now we just do our day’s work.”

Danny said, “Before, man, I work on the dustin rig from
six o’clock in the evenin to eight, nine o’clock the next
mornin. Dustin all night long. Sometimes we work fourteen
to sixteen hours a day.”

P. L. Vargas still looked worried. “Sometimes they want
you to prune two rows a day, and if you don’t do that, they
fire you. You say, ‘Look, you go too fast, you hurt the vines.’
Sometimes they forty cuts to a vine, but they don’t care!”

“And not all the people work the same—not all guys
work the same like us,” Danny said. “Some guys fast, some
guys not so fast, and then they are older guys, and ones
that ain’t had the experience. They
try
to work fast, but
they just can’t. They very poor people, so they sweat, you
know, they get nervous cause they so afraid, so they work
like animals. They
run!
” Danny laughed. Like P. L., he is a
broad, strong man, and his wide, open face has a mustache
on it. He laughed not because he was too callous to see the
pathos of the people, but because the pathos made him
nervous. “They
run
. And when they see the boss, they take
their hats off”—he tugged his forelock—“and keep runnin.
If they don’t, they get fired right away.” He acted out the
dialogue: “‘We got no more work for you.’ ‘Why?’ ‘We
got no more work for you, I said.’”

Vargas’ big face curled up in pain and distaste. “Before
Cesar was here, everybody was afraid.” He doffed his hat
in a slow, obsequious gesture. “Now we not afraid no more.
We goin to say the truth, and we goin fight for the right.”

“We learnin,” Danny said. “I tryin to learn a little bit
every day now, because I never go to school, and my father
never had no chance to go, so this is what I wantin for my
kids.”

“We got paid vacations now,” P. L. Vargas said, in a
voice suggesting that he could still scarcely believe it. “We
got seniority.”

“Yah!” Danny said. “You know Henry?” he asked P. L.,
who did not bother to answer. “Well, we got this colored
fella, Henry, that was out here eleven years and never got
no seniority on the best jobs. Now he’s drivin a tractor,
and he don’t believe it!” Danny squealed delightedly. “He
just don’t believe it!” Danny was silent for a little while,
rolling his sombrero in his hands. “I want the same thing
for everybody,” he said. “I want the Union for every poor
people in this country. I win more money, then they must
win it too, because they live in the same country where I
live and they buy the same thing what I buy.” He nodded
his head. “If you got a big family, one-forty an hour is not
much—you got to work twelve to sixteen hours every day.
This is the way they killin the peoples. A man workin seven
days a week for twenty, thirty years—I don’t think that
man is livin.”

Wondering if Danny Sanchez was the “Danny” Chavez
had spoken of who had been converted, I asked him if he
had not been against the Union in the beginning. Danny
looked sheepish, but he didn’t bluster. “Yah,” he said.
“People like me, they never heard nothing about a union,
we never know nothing what’s happen in the world. So I
was really against the Union, because I was afraid about
my job. I’m wrong, I know it, I
know
I’m wrong, but anyway,
after two, three month, I change!” Beaming, he spread
his arms out wide, inviting me to look at a changed man.
“I change!” he repeated gleefully, as if this were magic.
“And now I the Union man!”

“These people from Mexico, they very ignorant,” the
man in the belled hat repeated. He spoke mildly, and
Danny Sanchez took no visible offense; on the contrary,
he nodded cheerfully, as if what his friend had said was
a well-known fact. “They’re makin thirty dollars a day,”
the man continued, “and they don’t care about the people
who have to stay here. They go back to Mexico and live
like kings over there, but the people that have to stay, the
Americans, we’re the ones in trouble.”

Paul Vargas wanted me to talk to some more people, and
at one of the labor camps, now closed down, we listened
for a while to Henry Thomas, a dignified black man with a
gray mustache. Mr. Thomas discussed the difference that
the Union had made there at the ranch. “A lot of discrimination
in jobs they had that they don’t have it now—I
mean, they still a
little
in here, but it ain’t nothin like it
was.” He glanced at P. L. Vargas, who was leaning against
the car. It was noon now, and the fields were quiet. Around
us, in a grove of trees, stood the small boarded-up cabins
that had sheltered the wetbacks and
braceros
of other
years. Like the mockingbird hidden somewhere in the
grove, the sweet-voiced old man spoke quietly, so as not
to stir up the heat. “Conditions of work, they
much
better.
It changed so much, just like daylight and dark. I been
here a long time, and for my race of people it’s been pretty
tough. You had some was able to stay, and some wasn’t.
Some people can take more. The reason I’m here is because
I guess I can take more than a whole lot of other people
can.” His voice was bitter, rueful, but there was a stubborn
pride in it. “I been
done
enough to go, but I won’t go. But
since the Union, it been lightenin up a whole lot; I don’t
know anything would have helped it any better than the
Union, and I wish everybody in the whole country would
see it that way, but they some over where I live, they don’t
want to work on the Union, but it the best thing
I
know of.
And I think it’s goin to get better, and I got somebody in
front of me if anything go
too
far wrong; it ain’t like it used
to be. I got a chance to explain, and maybe they do
something about it.” He paused. “I mean, sometime it still seem
when they got nobody for a certain job, they just grab me,
and I’m willin to go along with all that, to help; I don’t
want to be complainin all the time, because I know the
Union, it’s a lot to get started in a place, and
somebody
got to take something, y’know. I willin to go along with
it.” Again he was looking at P. L., who was looking at the
ground. “Sometime it do seem like they pass me over for
the good job, and I know how to do every job they is here.
But I’m an old man, and I realize
that
too,
y’know.  .  .  .  And
I gettin a dollar-ninety here bein the yardman; I can remember
when I were gettin ninety  .  .  .  Me and another
colored boy that were workin here, they told us they
weren’t gone to give out no more vacations, but they had
some mens in here was gettin vacation and I was entitled to
it long ago. I been here steady since 1955, and I started in
’52. Well, the year that the Union came, they give me a
two-week vacation, and I don’t believe I would
ever
got a
vacation in my life if it hadn’t been for the Union. Might
be it
could
have happened, but that is my belief about it.”
He shook his head. “Oh, Chavez is a fine man: if it wouldn’t
been for him, I don’t know
where
we would have been.
Nobody else stood up for us. This boy”—he pointed at
P. L.—“they tried to strike in ’52, and they didn’t get
nowhere—everybody
against ’em.”